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God does not play dice – chromosome, nucleotide and bits.

First of all this is not a technical post neither a computer science post. Also, this is not a religious topic. We will talk about chromosomes, nucleotide how this can make me think there is a God or expanding to our cosmos a possible “Architect of Universe”. I am enjoying a short vacation, thus I reserve myself the right to think in something else besides code.

Sometime ago I was doing a training in Python to explore and analyse DNA sequences. A very basic introduction to chromosomes but something beyond that class really intrigued me.

Each single cell in human body has 23 chromosome and each chromosome has 5 BILLION nucleotide.

Each nucleotide is composed by a base, a phosphate and a deoxyribose (sugar).

The base can be formed by 4 different elements:

A – ADENINE

C – CYTOSINE

T – THYMINE

G – GUANINE

As you can see, the variance in a nucleotide is the base. So if the base has 4 different options and each chromosome is composed until 5 billion nucleotide then

5 billion nucleotide x 4 = 20 billion of possible "bits"

20 billion possible bits in a nucleotide!!!!

Then comes an analogy of these 20 billion bits mentioned by Dr Eneia Ferreira Carneiro, a Brazilian physician, polymath, and politician that passed away in 2007, but with some very simple corrections and changes done by me.

Looking to the alphabetic characters in the ASCII table, we need only 6 bits to identify a possible alphabetic character.

Then if a single chromosome has 20 billion bits, then we could represent a chromosome with:

20 billion bits / 6 = 3.3 billion letters

The English language, according to Poisson distribution has in average 4.79 letter per word.

So, 3.3 billion letters / 4.79 = 688.95 million letters

Then, if a book has in average 250 to 300 words in a page (see refs. below) we can have

688.95 million / 300 (worst case) = 2.3 million pages

When I published my first book it had 630 pages.

Finally to explain, a simple nucleotide I would need to write:

3645 books with 630 pages each

and all letters and words must follow a specific sequence to determine a human nucleotide.

Even people misinterpreting the quote pronounced by Albert Einstein saying “God does not play dice” thinking the fact the mentioned God, he really believed in a “god”. Actually Einstein never denied it saying:

“I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.” – Albert Einstein

My personal opinion I really refused in believe in “by the chance” in the formation of these 20 billion of bits that must follow a specific sequence to form a simple nucleotide. It is hard to accept, the carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water vapor. somehow generated the first 11 amino-acids used by life in Earth promoting later 20 billions bits cordially arranged.